At 80, I have a history so finding a place to start can be challenging. When I returned to Hawaii from Vietnam, I was interviewed by a reporter from a Honolulu newspaper. I was pretty seriously misquoted on almost everything except the prediction that the U.S. would ultimately become a post-industrial agricultural country, more or less as happened in Argentina. That was 1968, and for those who are new subscribers, it might be a good idea to add that I worked for the State Department and was assigned the task of reinventing the fiscal system of Vietnam. Also, for the record, I was then and always will be a pacifist. However, I saw tragedies that were completely unnecessary and very likely grounds for cases in The Hague.
Over the years, I have brooded on why such events happen, how they can be prevented, and what is necessary to create peace, harmony, safety, and health for everyone. Now, with the Internet, anyone can blog anything or set himself or herself up as a news channel, but just how many people are out of the box and thinking clearly.
San Miguel de Allende, Mexico¹
The Gauntlet
To make this a bit fun, try to imagine a world without money. Earth humans might be the only species that seems to think it needs to trade something to get what is wanted or needed. If we accept this assumption, it behooves us to create a system that makes exchange and bartering easy.
Basically, this is what we have: a financial system that creates currency out of nothingness and uses the power of politics to enforce its acceptance. Many, especially the BRICS, are rebelling against fiat currency without actually coming up with a fair alternative. Just to be clear, various proposals have been put on the table; but to be sustainable, the system must not only be equitable but just, transparent, and impervious to greed and fraud. Also, it must not infringe freedom of choice or privacy. Maybe I am missing something, but I have not actually seen such a blueprint.
Backing currency with tangible assets is not out of the box: it is a Band-Aid that allows an inherently flawed system to experience a little more longevity. In the left-right paradigm, there are pressures to be more socialistic or more capitalistic, but these are still just baby rattles that need to be replaced by mature solutions.
The real problem is deep and relates to how power is used or abused. For all intents and purposes, many systems would serve our needs IF the rules were followed. Meanwhile, I have some thoughts and others can certainly add to them.
Guilds
Prior to the industrial revolution and still today in some traditional systems, enterprises tended to be community-based. We can use herbal medicine as an example because it is perhaps the industry I know best; however, the same ideas would apply if making shoes or pastries or sombreros.
The production of medicine is a more or less formal discipline where academic training traditionally took place in a monastery or university. However, once acquiring the highest training possible and interning under masters, one might open a clinic in a town or village. The clinic needs to have an apothecary shop. The shop needs to have herbs and staff who know which parts of the plant to use and how to combine the herbs with other other herbs and make them into medicine.
So, there are laboratory technicians and trainees performing entry-level tasks like cleaning the herbs, drying them, putting them into bottles, grinding them, making tablets, and so on and so forth. The laboratory has to have a source of herbs so there are farmers and wildcrafters who provide the herbs needed. A very young person may accompany a shaman or master herbalist and spend years learning where to find the herbs, when to harvest them, and how to guarantee their sustainability.
Once in a while, demand vastly exceeds supply. This often happens when there is an epidemic. At such times, the local apothecary shop has to depend on trade or imports. This has happened many times throughout history. Whether we are talking about smallpox or the plague or malaria, there have often been occasions when the supply was insufficient to meet the demand. Then, the herbs become scarce and expensive. Goldenseal is an excellent example of how periodically, it was in such short supply that the prices soared. Today, there are many valuable medicinal plants that are endangered. For example, with the extremely high rate of infection with Lyme disease, guaiacum is in such short supply that it is illegal to gather broken twigs that are on the ground. I am working extremely hard to establish guaiacum plantations because, once mature, this tree offers potent medicine.
The point here is that if one starts as a helper and then apprentices for years and eventually studies with a master, one understands the entire industry and the networks that support the industry. There is an interconnection between the people who gather herbs in the forest and those actually working in the clinics and hospitals where the treatments are offered.
I spent quite a bit of time in Ecuador and learned that if a large quantity of an herb were needed, it might involve a hundred or a thousand small producers, each of whom could only deliver one or two pounds of the herb. This is perfect for a community. Then, once a year, there are herb fairs where people trade herbs for cash or other commodities that they need. Everyone involved understands the organic nature of this process, and there are no stockholders or executives in big cities interfering with the grassroots enterprises.
Interdependence
Patients need treatments that work. They are dependent on the knowledge and dedication of the herbalists who, in turn, are dependent on the laboratories who are dependent on the suppliers. If there is a question about decision making, where should the decisions be made? Isn’t it obvious that the clinicians have the most expertise because they observe the actions and reactions to the therapies.
Everyone has overhead. In the long-run, this is paid by the patients and patrons. In a monastic setting, pious people may tithe to the church. To settle some details about his life, I was recently reading about Nicolaus Copernicus. Long story short, he was born into a wealthy family and entered the University of Kraków at age 18. He studied mathematics, astronomy, and astrology. Ultimately, he studied in five of the best universities in Europe, including Bologna, Padua, and Ferrara. At the time, Italy was the best place to study medical astrology, but he added anatomy and Greek philosophy to his studies. He spent 13 years in institutions of higher learning and then returned to assume a position in the church. His official function did not include medicine, but he was the one providing treatments, and the church had a leprosy hospital near his office. We can be almost certain that the hospital was supported by donations, but this is not always the case nor need it be the case.
Apothecary Items from the former Holy Spirit Hospital
History of Medicine Department of the Nicolaus Copernicus Museum²
Vested Interests
In today’s world, the distance between the wildcrafter and boardroom is enormous. The corporations that own the hospitals and produce drugs are incredibly powerful and suffer from major conflicts of interest. There are stockholders, employees, and customers, each with entirely different needs.
Let’s say that the treatment for Lyme disease could conceivably cost $1000. It doesn’t in today’s world because it is seldom diagnosed early, and the treatments are mostly ineffective, but they are extremely profitable. So, it is not unusual for patients to spend $35,000 before even being diagnosed correctly. Who profits?
How much does the corporate owner make? How much is the doctor paid? How much did the medications cost? What was the raw material price? Who supplied the ingredients in the medications? What happens if the corporation is sued or goes bankrupt?
The CEO gets a golden parachute and sells his stock before the public realizes what is happening. The company is bought up by an even bigger company, one that has the same inherent conflicts of interest.
Regardless of how we look at this, it is always the patient who pays. He pays the insurance company and/or the bills that were not covered by insurance. The trickle down is really a trickle because the profits stay at the top. However, the real problem is that profits and cures serve entirely different interests.
Wall Street
Fresh out of grad school, I worked on Wall Street for two and half years. To be fair, the bank was very well managed, dignified, and had superb ethics where clients and employees were concerned. There were two turning points for me. The first was that the senior member of our research group took a one-month vacation when Vatican II was considering whether or not the Church should approve birth control. This seems like a religious question, not an investment opportunity, but the phone was ringing all day long with customers asking which stock to buy in the event that birth control is approved. I was spending hours every day combing the files in our library. These included horrific pictures of deformed infants whose mothers had taken Thalidomide. I was young, innocent, and perhaps blind to the flaws in our system. I convinced myself that Eli Lilly would go belly up when the law suits were settled.
Obviously, it didn’t happen then, and it might be worse now.
The second turning point involved the bloodshed in Vietnam. I was offered several different jobs and left for Saigon in December 1966.
The reason for bringing up ancient history is that it really does seem worse now than 55 years ago. The pharmaceutical industry is still escaping most of the consequences of producing dangerous substances, and the government is still twisting facts to suit its agenda. Lives are being wasted senselessly, widows and orphans are bearing the consequences of extremely poor leadership and an absence of social values.
Who benefits? Is everything mere coincidence or is it intentional? Unfortunately, when working for the government, I read a lot of secret documents so I have weigh in on the side of deliberate deception with malevolent intent.
Solutions
The first step is to wake up. Do not pay for insurance that does not allow you to choose the method of treatment. No fine print! If you are forced to surrender money you have earned, you must have a choice as to how that money is used. No one has the right to deny you the treatment of your choice. If that choice is taken away, we are talking about tyranny, not compassion for those that cannot afford treatment. All insurance must be valid anywhere on the Planet. If you are paying for financial protection in case of a crisis, it must cover all countries and methods of treatment. Your money: your choice!
Second, establish training hospitals where all methods of treatment are available and tested in clinical settings with professional oversight: senior practitioners with broad understanding of many healing modalities.
Third, create educational institutions for teaching and study of all approaches to healing from ancient to modern.
Structure of Enterprises
The obligation of corporations is to stockholders. Once this is perfectly understood, we realize that the priorities are incorrect. There are, as mentioned, interest groups: suppliers of materials used in production, employees, owners, and, in the case, of health-related enterprises, patients. If the “product” offered to the patients does not meet the needs and expectations of patients, the enterprise is failing its social responsibility. In extreme cases, this should be the basis for removal of top management and perhaps dissolution of the corporation. Then, the question is whether the gutted company can be sold to a competitor for pennies on the dollar, as with the banks, nationalized, or taken over by the employees, which, in my opinion is a better solution, but not a perfect one because there is no guarantee that the product will be improved. All that really changes is the management. The company can still be operated for the benefit of the owners rather than the patients. In short, the ideal would be to give a voice to the patients and their families that is equal to the best professional opinion of the doctors and researchers.
We have been indoctrinated so that we believe that competition is a form of freedom and that it assures the best outcome at the lowest price. Isn’t this a fallacy? Unless there really are economies of scale, the expectation would be that corners were cut to compete in the marketplace. Ultimately, this does not benefit patients.
So, this mantra does not pass the litmus test. What I have observed is inferior products, sometimes of dubious usefulness.
My sense is that a modern form of guilds would be far superior and much more responsive to the community. Even if the cost of doing business lacks the benefits of economies of scale, these costs are easily offset by drastically lower transportation and storage costs.
Using herbs as an example, in a two ounce bottle, the cost of ingredients is very, very small. There is the cost of the bottle and cap plus the herbs and liquids used in extraction, but these are probably less than a dollar. The rest is labor, overhead, and shipping. A traditional local apothecary shop could conceivably make a decent profit by selling the herb for $7-10, but with shipping added, the cost jumps to more like $25-30. When we understand this, we realize that assembly lines might not be as efficient and cost effective as first imagined.
Going back to 1968, I based some of my prediction on the fact that the U.S. was exporting production to cheaper overseas competitors. Going back even further, some of us can still remember when the family bought its first television or when we saw a VW Bug for the first time. Asian production of televisions quickly overtook domestic production, and Detroit slept through the competition from foreign automotive producers. Yes, there is more profit per vehicle for high end cars, but the demand for smaller cars that got better mileage was huge.
What I did not see in 1968 was chemtrails and the devastating effects that would ensue. I did know about dangerous chemicals because I had seen how Agent Orange was used in Vietnam. I also knew that fake foods would be rolled out because as the only woman in my office on Wall Street, I had initially been put in charge of the food and beverage industry and had attended many banquets in which companies were talking about the future of food. Genetic engineering was not discussed, but meat substitutes were, and having lived in Japan, I had eaten in Zen restaurants where tofu was made to look like everything we were used to eating.
Soy products.³
Copyright by Dr. Ingrid Naiman 2023 || All Rights Reserved
Image Credit:
¹ Dreamstime: Bernardo Ramonfaur
² https://commons.wikimedia.org/wiki/File:Frombork_Stara_6_-_20.JPG
³ Dreamstime: Igor Dutina
I think that the model of a sustainable system needs to exist in the family or/and the environment where youth grows up. The rules of such a system will be organically absorbed and followed.
In this regard, I like the concept of the apprenticeship used in the medieval guilds. The master was an established craftsman of recognized abilities who took on apprentices; these were boys in late childhood or adolescence who boarded with the master’s family and were trained by him in the elements of his trade. The role of guilds were”... to introduce a system of art or craft to a new individual, to instill in them the idea of standards, quality, consistency, and perfection…”
Here is the quote from Kristine Wilson-Slack’s article “Apprentice, Journeyman, and Master: The Medieval Guild”:
“The interesting thing is that the main function of the guild was not to produce goods or fix techniques ‘per se’ – those were supporting roles to the main function of the guild. The guild existed to serve a singular purpose: to train Apprentices. Bringing in and bonding Apprentices ensured a continuity of quality workmanship, consistent goods being produced, and traditions being maintained. Thus, the role of the Guild was not to form rules, mores, regulations, and laws with respect to their crafts; their role was to introduce a system of art or craft to a new individual, to instill in them the idea of standards, quality, consistency, and perfection. Their goal was to expand their horizons and technical knowledge in a specific area so they might provide for their towns as well as their families. Guilds and guild members served the community as much as they served themselves.”
copied from the article of Kristine Wilson-Slack “Apprentice, Journeyman, and Master: The Medieval Guild” https://blog.philosophicalsociety.org/2018/01/10/apprentice-journeyman-and-master-the-medieval-guild/